Week 12: Entrepreneur's Journey & Business Model Canvas

 Entrepreneur's Journey 

    In commencing the startup idea of our group, the Heartseekers, having a roadmap for entrepreneurship ahead of the journey. I learned that it is important to feel what it's like to be on an employee's shoes before you can become a boss of a company. This means that along the journey for each member of the Heartseekers, becoming an employee is an essential step if we want to pursue an entrepreneurial career in the future, and whether the Heartseekers will continue to exist or not. Furthermore, I learned that these 2 tips on a successful entrepreneurship:

1. Family with Established Business
2. Putting up your own startup business

        Having someone who has an experience with entrepreneurship helps a lot as they can give insights to us. They already know what it feels like throughout the journey, and they already know the ups and downs along the way. This is exactly the reason why investing in training, they can give me a headstart through entrepreneurship journey if I ever pursue it in the future.

Business Model Canvas

    Business model canvas is where I experienced confusion, at the very least at the beginning, because it was my first time hearing this term in entrepreneurship. In addition to this, there's the value proposition which also requires another canvas to anchor the points. The value proposition has the following components:

• Gain and Gain Creator
• Pain and Pain Reliever
• Jobs to be done 
• Products and Services

    In all these pointers, I and my groupmates thought long and hard as to what should we put in there. So for Gain, we simply inversed the main problem in our startup idea, and we came up with Enhanced Decision Making, since students will gain insights before visiting stores. In addition to these are saving allowance, because of no more wasted trip; save time; enhanced productivity, because students can focus on other tasks; and convenience.

    Based on these gains, we needed to brainstorm on how we can create these mentioned gains. Based on insights gained from previous interviews, we decided that our gain creator are efficient search functionalities, efficiency, detailed store information, and personalized recommendation. 

    As for the pains, we simply branched it from the main problem: Lack of information, lack of convenience, insufficient shopping, and limited access to stores. From these, we can decide what the relievers to these pains. We decided that these are real-time inventory updates, up-to-date information on components, and expansion and scaling. 

     Our business model canvas is mostly a mess, because we didn't really understand it back then until a later time. In a future blog, I will be discussing these mistakes we committed in creating the business model canvas. Going back, our key resources was internet connection, because we thought that since it is a mobile application with real time features, it needed an internet connection; and platform as it is a mobile application. For customer relationship, to be honest, we simply followed a default format, because we thought it could be common for most startup products. For the key activities, we connected it with the value proposition. As for key features, we put local store and retailers as our thought was we are aiming for partnership with local stores. For channel, we thought that since customers use the product through mobile app, we placed mobile platform. For Cost Structure, we placed possible costs if the app were to be implemented. For revenue stream, we placed partnership with local stores as this is the main edge of our startup product to our competitors. With these, the target market are simply the students and the business owners.